Canadian Food
Canadian Cuisine?
Secondly, it's sometimes harder to single out things that you're very familiar with as unique. Many of the 'meat and potatoes' meals I grew up on, some of which I now call 'comfort food', probably originated in England and Ireland: baked beans, roast beef Sunday dinners, breakfast sausage and liver, meatloaf, stew with dumplings or biscuits, shepherds pie, to name a few. Vegetables generally came from a can: peas, corn, carrots, pork'n'beans.
Special occasions like Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving and birthdays called for a few fresh and different vegetables, like spinach, squash and broccoli along with the stuffed turkey or baked ham. Somewhere along the line, tourtiere, perogies, cabbage rolls and sausage rolls became the traditional Christmas Eve open house buffet in our household.
Summertime (without air-conditioning) brought the kitchen outside with pretty regular barbecues: usually hot dogs and hamburgers for the kids and steaks, pork and chicken for the adults. There's so much to say about barbecuing in Canada and around the world, that I'm devoting a whole section to it: BBQ, Barbecue, Barbeque!
Another favourite summertime meal was tomato sandwiches on white bread with lots of mayonnaise (the Miracle Whip kind, not real mayonnaise in our house). Fresh field tomatoes in the region where I grew up (near Leamington, Ontario, the home of Heinz ketchup) were unbelievably flavorful, plump and juicy, and I feasted on them like apples. And then there was the sweet corn-on-the-cob, almost daily through the season.
Whether anyone else would identify any of those foods and dishes as Canadian, well, I don't know, but while I was growing up, I thought I was eating Canadian food.
Regions and Seasons Make Canadian Food Canadian
There are actually several regional and seasonal contributions to Canadian cuisine. Starting from the east and travelling west through the maritime provinces, Quebec, Ontario, the prairies, the west coast and the north, we have Atlantic lobster and salmon, PEI mussels, Canadian maple syrup in late winter, fiddleheads in the spring, Ontario lamb, Alberta beef, Pacific Salmon and shrimp, fresh lake fish of all kinds across the country, and venison from deer, elk, caribou and moose. In southwestern Ontario and Alberta, ostrich farms have been springing up recently.
When you travel across Canada, you'll also notice a rich ethnic diversity in the food and culture. Vancouver has a very large Asian population: all-you-can-eat sushi restaurants are everywhere! There are a huge number of East Indian restaurants and markets and neighbourhoods and a famous Chinatown, along with a more prominent First Nations influence on cuisine than I've noticed elsewhere, although I haven't yet travelled through the Prairies or very far north.
I've been eating and cooking many of these regional and seasonal Canadian foods all my life, but because I 'wing-it' through most cooking adventures, I haven't written much of it down yet. The Recipe for Travel's Canadian Recipes Index will feature many recipes for the unique Canadian food mentioned here over time. Return soon, or opt-in to one of the ways to stay up-to-date below.
